This book examines the idea of the self in Anglophone literatures from British colonies in Africa and the subcontinent, and in the context of intercultural encounter, literary hybridity and globalization. The project examines texts by eight authors across the colonial, postwar and post-9/11 eras – Olaudah Equiano, Sake Dean Mahomet, Henry Callaway, R.C. Temple, Amos Tutuola, G.V. Desani, Tsitsi Dangarembga and Aravind Adiga – in order to map different strategies of selfhood across four fields of literature: autobiographical life writing, folk anthology, postwar fabulism, and contemporary realism. Drawing on historical analysis, psychological inquiry, comparative linguistics, postcolonial criticism and social theory, this book responds to a renewed emphasis on the narrative strategies and creative choices involved in a literary construction of the self. Threaded through this investigation is an analysis of the effects of globalization, or the intensification of intercultural and dialogic complexity over time.

This book examines the idea of the self in Anglophone literatures from British colonies in Africa and the subcontinent, and in the context of intercultural encounter, literary hybridity and globalization. The project examines texts by eight authors across the colonial, postwar and post-9/11 eras – Olaudah Equiano, Sake Dean Mahomet, Henry Callaway, R.C. Temple, Amos Tutuola, G.V. Desani, Tsitsi Dangarembga and Aravind Adiga – in order to map different strategies of selfhood across four fields of literature: autobiographical life writing, folk anthology, postwar fabulism, and contemporary realism. Drawing on historical analysis, psychological inquiry, comparative linguistics, postcolonial criticism and social theory, this book responds to a renewed emphasis on the narrative strategies and creative choices involved in a literary construction of the self. Threaded through this investigation is an analysis of the effects of globalization, or the intensification of intercultural and dialogic complexity over time.

In South Asia, as elsewhere, the category of ‘the public’ has come under increased scholarly and popular scrutiny in recent years. To better understand this current conjuncture, we need a fuller understanding of the specifically South Asian history of the term. To that end, this book surveys the modern Indian ‘public’ across multiple historical contexts and sites, with contributions from leading scholars of South Asia in anthropology, history, literary studies and religious studies. As a whole, this volume highlights the complex genealogies of the public in the Indian subcontinent during the colonial and postcolonial eras, showing in particular how British notions of ‘the public’ intersected with South Asian forms of publicity. Two principal methods or approaches—the genealogical and the typological—have characterised this scholarship. This book suggests, more in the mode of genealogy, that the category of the public has been closely linked to the sub-continental history of political liberalism. Also discussed is how the studies collected in this volume challenge some of liberalism’s key presuppositions about the public and its relationship to law and religion.

Imagining London examines representations of the English metropolis in Canadian, West Indian, South Asian, and second-generation 'black British' novels written in the last half of the twentieth century.

Imagining Vernacular Histories is centered on the idea of engaging with indigenous African cosmologies that signal at pluriversality. In conversation with Toyin Falola’s reading of the African pluriverse and his exploration of the idea of “ritual archives,” the contributors to this volume rethink the historical archive in search of vernacular histories. Simultaneously, they recognize the contributions from various other disciplines in pluralizing the term vernacular. The book brings together a wide range of topics, such as reflections on African historiography; the relationship between memory, history and literature; gender relations; and the construction of historical archives. While appropriating Falola’s conception of vernacular histories, the contributors collectively argue that pluriversality and ritual archives can potentially rescue African historical and creative scholarship from the sustained practices of epistemicide. Simultaneously, Imagining Vernacular Histories focuses on the emerging interdisciplinary conversations on constructing the pluriverse as well as on the geopolitics of knowledge production. Through a critical appreciation of Falola’s engagement with the ideas of postcoloniality, decolonizing epistemologies, and pluriversality, this book locates his scholarship in relation to postcolonial theory emerging from the Global South.

Re-imagining South Asian Religions is a collection of essays offering new ways of understanding aspects of Hindu, Tibetan Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, Theosophical, and Indian Christian experiences. Moving away from canonical texts, established authorities, and received historiography, the essays in this volume draw from a range of methodological perspectives including philosophy, history, hermeneutics, migration and diaspora studies, ethnography, performance studies, lived religion approaches, and aesthetics. Reflecting a balance of theory and substantive content, the papers in this volume call into question key critical terms, challenge established frames of reference, and offer innovative and alternative interpretations of South Asian ways of knowing and being.

“South Asia 2060” is a dialogue between 47 thought leaders, ranging from policymakers to academics to civil society activists and visionaries from across South Asia and the world, on the likely longer-range trajectories of South Asia's future as a region. The collection explores how South Asia's regional future will impact the rest of the world while also shedding light on its present condition.

One of the most fascinating, rapidly developing, and difficult areas of literary and cultural studies today is postcolonialism. Focused on postcolonialism and designed especially for those studying postcolonial studies, Re-Shaping Culture and Identity in postcolonial Fiction: Salman Rushdie and Abdulrazak Gurnah introduces key subject areas of concern such as culture and identity in a clear accessible and organised fashion. It provides an overview of the development of postcolonialism as a discipline and takes a close look at its important authors, Salman Rushdie and Abdulrazak Gurnah, and their selected oeuvres, Fury, Midnight’s Children, By the Sea and Memory of Departure. With a palimpsestic analysis of culture and identity as crucial features of postcolonial texts, Re-Shaping Culture and Identity in postcolonial Fiction: Salman Rushdie and Abdulrazak Gurnah argues how postcolonialism functions in allowing the formation of a new perspective on the contemporary world. Besides, it offers an alternative perspective on their works, one that promotes the importance of the issue of postcolonial agency. This book will prove invaluable to anyone studying English Language and Literature, Migration Studies, and Cultural Studies. Contents Introduction: the borders of culture and identity A critical approach to culture and identity under the light of postcolonial theory The contributons of Abdulrazak Gurnah and Salman Rushdie to postcolonial literature Non- homes in postcolonial culture (Un)belonging postcolonial identity Conclusion: towards a new understanding of culture and identity Bibliography

Lived Islam in South Asia: Adaptation, Accommodation and Conflict is an extremely timely and important publication. Fourteen interesting papers, based on intensive fieldwork in Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and India, explore a highly controversial subject. They touch on the everyday religious lives of the Muslims in these countries. The book argues that Islam cannot be understood through the works of theologians alone, for whom it is a formal, uniform and rigid system of beliefs and practices. Popular Islam, or Islam as it is practised by millions of Muslims in South Asia, has an empirical validity and is a dynamic process of adjustment and accommodation as well as conflict with other religions, with which it coexists.

This study argues that the private homes in transnational women's fiction reflect public legacies of colonialism. Published in Australia, Canada, India, Nigeria, Puerto Rico and the United States between 1995 and 2005, the novels use fictional houses to criticize and unsettle home and homeland, depicting their linked oppressions and exclusions.